Create a course with a forum, enrol a couple of students. Post in the forum using the two students accounts Delete one of the students accounts Enable "Mobile services": Plugins ► Web Services ► Mobile You need to create a token for the student you didn't delete for the Mobile Service, for creating a Token: Click on Site administration ► Plugins ► Web services ► Manage tokens Click add, select user and service (Mobile Service) Execute the following command in a console, you have to change: wstoken: With the token you created forumid: With the forum instance id (id of the forum in the forum table) curl 'http://localhost/m/stable_master/webservice/rest/server.php?moodlewsrestformat=json' --data 'forumid=8&wsfunction=mod_forum_get_forum_discussions_paginated&wstoken=493d2e785f81515296cf09e05f1f8179' --compressed Confirm that you receive all the messages, including the ones with the user deleted, the users deletes have an empty profile image URL Note, you can use jsonlint.com to validate and format the json returned string or append "| python -m json.tool" to automatically format the command output